WHAT SAVAGES THINK

Waipa Post, Volume 36, Issue 2146, 19 April 1928, Page 2

WHAT SAVAGES THINK

The white man is just as peculiar to savages as savages are to the white man. A naked South Seas cannibal once told me he could not understand why whites dressed, in the daytime and undressed at night Osays Jack McLaren in the London Daily Mail). "In the night, when it is cold, we people put our clothes on," he said in effect; "and in the daytime, when it is hot, we take them off." It sounded very logical. In a remote Stolomon Islands village close to where the Hecent murder of two white men took place, a man asked me was it true, as he had been told, that in white men's countries the people quarrelled and stole so much that strong men called policemen continually walked the streets to keep the peace.

In his own village, he said, there was little quarrelling except with 'Other villages or with intruders—and hardly any stealing at all. He said he had thought that white men would have known better than to behave like that.

Another savage thought it strange that whites rejoiced and made holiday only at specified times, such as Christmas and Easter.

His he said, jubilated just whenever they felt like it, which, incidentally, was very often indeed. He thought that our capacity for enjoyment must be extremely limited, in that we had to have special times and arrangements for it.

In New Guinea a native ttold me that the meanest person he had ever heard of was a white man he had been told about during a brief visit to a mission station.

This man, it appeared, discovered that a mighty flood was coming, and he built a large boat with a house on Unlaced on board all his pigs, fowls, and dogs, and with his family sailed away and left the rest of the people to drown. The name of this mean person was Moses, he thought, and the boat wds called Perhaps I had hoard of it? In some of the South Seas settlements there are cinemas, but the films shown are usually viery old and mutilated; therefore the natives have a film belief that in white men's countries it is always raining !